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The Dark Side of Culture (8): The Culture of Genocide - The Zone of Interest

Writer's picture: Jan DehnJan Dehn

Updated: Jan 1


The Zone of Interest shows what happens when mass-murder is normalised in the final stages of fascism (Source: here)

 

Half a year ago, close friends asked me if I had seen The Zone of Interest and what I thought about the movie. At the time, I had not yet seen it, but yesterday I caught up. This short note summarises my impression of the film.

 

For those who have not seen it, The Zone of Interest is based on a novel by Martin Amis. The zone referred to in the title is an area of land 40 square kilometres in size that surrounded the Auschwitz concentration camp. The land was confiscated by Nazis to isolate the camp from the surrounding areas, enhance security, reduce the likelihood of escapes, and to house camp staff, including Rudolf Höss, the camp commandant. Most of the movie is set within the zone of interest, although some action also takes place in Berlin.


There is not much of a plot. The film depicts the daily lives of the members of the Höss household, who live in a large house directly adjacent to the concentration camp wall. The main development in the movie is Rudolf Höss' promotion to deputy inspector for all concentration camps in the Reich. The new job takes him to Berlin, but Höss is eventually able to return to Auschwitz after being put in charge of organising the transport of 700,000 Hungarian Jews for forced labour and extermination. Those who wish to learn more about the plot of the movie can go here.

 

One of the defining features of The Zone of Interest is that it never shows the actual atrocities taking place within the Auschwitz concentration camp complex. Instead, the film hints at the horror through a constant hum of distant gunshots and muffled screams, dogs barking, occasional shouting, snippets of kill-orders, smoke billowing into the sky from crematorium chimneys, the orange light from the furnaces in the night sky, and plumages of ash from the ovens drifting down a nearby river.

 

The absence of pictures from within the camp complex is deliberate and meant to support the film's core message that mass-murder becomes banal in the final stages of fascism. By only referencing the attrocities indirectly through background images and noises, the viewer is forced to focus on the daily routines of the Höss household, which – and this is the point – turn out to be utterly mundane.

 

The members of the Höss family are entirely unremarkable. Like most families, they are a close unit, whose members struggles with all usual problems of balancing their ambitions and desires. Like any senior executive, Rudolf Höss works hard to the best he can be at his job, while at the same time being a good husband and father. Frau Höss takes an active interest in the kids, manages the household and the garden, and takes an active interest in the family’s social circle. The Höss children go to school in the mornings and play in the garden in the afternoons, just like children anywhere in the world.


There is, in other words, nothing to set the Höss family apart from any other successful German family in this period – or indeed any successful European or American family in any other period.


Yet, Rudolf Höss and his family were far from normal. Rudolf Höss commanded Auschwitz, the main site of one of the worst genocides in history. In an affidavit made at Nuremburg on 5 April 1946, Höss stated:

 

"I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total of about 3,000,000 dead.(Source: here)

 

By depicting the home-life of Höss and his family in very conventional terms, The Zone of Interest shows that even the most inhumane actions can be made to seem entirely conventional with the right amount of conditioning.


Throughout the 1930s, the Nazis employed propaganda to de-humanise Jews. By the early 1940s, the Nazis had been so successful in this endeavour that mass-murder of Jews and other 'sub-humans' has become entirely normalised. At this point, a camp commandant of Auschwitz was regarded as no less worthy or legitimate than any other prestigious executive position in business, industry, or government.

 

The Zone of Interest is a warning about the normalisation of evil that happens in the final stages of fascism. It is highly relevant today, because political forces in Europe and the United States are once again, albeit still clumsily, dabbling in policies that aim to isolate minorities, including Jews, but especially targeting Muslims and refugees. This clumsy policy-fumbling is how all episodes of fascism have begun.

 

By the time Rudolf Höss was running Auschwitz, the German population was further down the road towards fascism than what we have seen so far in modern Europe an the United States; by then Germans had completely bought into the idea that Jews were animals, who could be disposed of without any moral scruples whatsoever. They had also accepted the idea that anyone who did not agree with this view of Jews would share their fate. The few Germans who resisted therefore went about their business with extreme caution (as indeed the film illustrates in the scenes with a Polish girl - a person who actually existed - who risked her life at night to leave apples in the soil for the starving slave workers).

 

Even though The Zone of Interest does not show the atrocities of Auschwitz, it is nevertheless full of scenes the show how mass-murder has become mundane. Let me highlight three that made particular impressions on me:

 

First, while the members of the Höss family barely notice the constant din of death from behind the camp walls, there is one occasion in which you get a reaction, when one of the Höss sons overhears an order to drown a camp inmate, who has been caught fighting over an apple. When the son overhears the punishment being metered out to the inmate, he mutters to himself, “He should not have done that”. To the son, the criminal act is that the starving Jew fought for an apple, not that the Jew was incarcerated, forced into slave labour, starved, and sentenced arbitrarily to a gruesome death by drowning merely for trying to get something to eat.

 

The second scene that struck me was when Rudolf Höss came close to panicking, when his children played in the river, when the waters suddenly filled with ash and bone fragments from incinerated prisoners. Höss has no concern whatsoever for the incinerated Jews, whose remains are floating down the river; his sole concern is that his Aryan children could come into contact with body parts of Jews. The children are rushed home and scrubbed to ensure they are 'clean'.

 

The third scene is one of the last scenes in the film, when Rudolf Höss finds himself at a party in Berlin. He has just been assigned the mammoth task of organising the transport of Hungarian Jews. As he makes to leave the party, he suddenly bends over and vomits. My initial (naive) thought was that maybe he had developed a sense of remorse, but then the movie cut to modern-day Auschwitz showing Polish employees cleaning the gas chambers and the ovens for visitors. It dawned on me then that remorse was the last thing on Rudolf Höss’s mind as he was throwing up; he had merely been temporarily overwhelmed by sheer magnitude of the task before him. He quickly recovered and went on to complete his task successfully, to the detriment of an unfathomable number of innocent victims.


–––––

 

It takes a lot of hard work and persistence – and the full force of the state – to brainwash an entire population into accepting the annihilation of an entire population. Yet, we see this happening today. Having vilified and oppressed Palestinians for decades with policies far worse than anything Apartheid South Africa ever produced, Israelis have by now become so de-sensitised to the humanity of Palestinians that they too are now treating another people like animals. And killing them indiscriminately in large numbers.


Gaza.


The majority of Israelis appear to feel no empathy whatsoever with their Palestinian neighbours. Earlier this year, the New York Times cited polls showing that 94 percent of Israelis believe the level of force used against Palestinians in Gaza is "appropriate" or even "insufficient". Another poll found that most Israelis oppose food and medicine getting into Gaza.

 

With attitudes like these so widespread among ordinary Israelis, it is no wonder the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have had carte blanche to kill. So far, IDF has killed more than 25 Palestinians for every Israeli killed on 7 October 2023. The vast majority of those killed are children and women with no connection to Hamas. The true death toll is likely much higher, because IDF is barring anyone from excavating the destroyed buildings in Gaza. More than 100,000 Palestinians have been injured.

 

Neutral observers can see that Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza; the wholesale slaughter of civilians, the UN being kicked out. Israel is deliberately targeting hospitals and education facilities. It is purposefully engineering famine by holding back food and medical assistance. The total destruction of infrastructure and housing in Gaza are a precursor for Israel’s own version of Lebensraum as hardline Zionists openly discuss plans to annex the territory of Gaza to gain greater access to the sea.


It is straight out of the Nazi playbook.

 

The Zone of Interest is also highly relevant in the context of recent political developments in the United States. Unlike previous US elections, the recent US election was not just a battle between Left and Right. Rather, voters had to choose between systems, democracy or authoritarianism. Now that Trump has won, it seems clear to me that he will dismantle the remaining independence of the US judiciary and, from then on, rule above the law. That is exactly what Hitler did. It is what all dictators do. If Trump is allowed to assume dictatorial powers, the US will have taken a huge leap towards what the The Zone of Interest depicts with such chilling accuracy.

 

The End

 

 

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